Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to gravitational wave pioneers

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The 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics has gone to US-based Professors Kip Thorne, Barry Barish and Rainer Weiss, three key figures in detecting ripples in space-time that were originally theorised by Einstein.

They’ve been awarded the prize ‘for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves’ that were first detected two years ago on Earth, a feat made possible with significant input from the UK.

Key early contributions to the LIGO project came from the late Scottish physicist Prof Ron Drever. Professor Drever, who passed away earlier this year, co-founded the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) with Prof Kip Thorne at Caltech and Prof Rainer Weiss at MIT between 1984 and 1994.

LIGO is operated by Caltech and MIT with funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and supported by over 1,000 researchers around the world, including those at the Universities of Glasgow, Cardiff and Birmingham amongst others in the UK.

Scientists from the University of Glasgow’s Institute for Gravitational Research led on the conception, development, construction and installation of the sensitive mirror suspensions in the heart of the LIGO detectors.

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